Piano Concerto No. 2 in C Minor

This C Minor masterpiece is dedicated to Nikolai Dahl, the Paris-trained amateur viola player and physician who, with a series of daily therapy sessions over a period of months, helped Rachmaninoff climb out of his depression. At the root of the composer’s sense of despair was the disastrous premiere of his First Symphony in 1897—its critical reception was so bad that the composer, for three years, lost all confidence in his ability to compose. Following Dahl’s treatment, which combined hypnosis and positive-suggestion therapy, the Second Piano Concerto became the work that put Rachmaninoff's name on the musical map—and in such virtuosic style. At the outset we hear the piano’s giant chords tolling like bells, before the strings give us the first of the work’s sweeping, profoundly Russian-sounding themes. The composer’s stretch at the piano was nothing short of gigantic—his hands could span well over an octave—and this is reflected in the dexterity required of the pianist in this whirlwind opening movement, in the second movement’s wild cadenza, and in the ecstatic climaxes of the last movement. With its yearning motifs, the Concerto’s themes were famously used by director David Lean in his hit 1945 film Brief Encounter, about the doomed romance between the married Laura Jesson (Celia Johnson) and Alec Harvey (Trevor Howard), the stranger she meets by chance at a railway station.